All posts tagged Israel

A mountie always gets his (or her) man. The RCMP misused eye-tracking in the 1960s.

The mouse liberated computer users from the tyranny of the flashing cursor and the command line and brought the world the desktop. Touch, popularized by smartphones and tablets (but actually dating back to the late 1960s), liberated us from the keyboard. Now, an Israeli company wants to open up another way for us to interact with our devices: eye and head tracking.

Eye tracking is not new (think of companies like Sweden’s Tobii Technology AB) but typically needs special hardware to be used. Three Israeli engineers, Tuvia Elbaum, Yitzi Kempinski and Nir Blushtein, have developed a software-based solution designed for mobile devices that uses nothing more than your phone’s camera. The Jerusalem-based company is called Umoove.

“When you are talking mobile, that is something incredibly complicated,” said Mr. Kempinski. “The camera is hand-held, so every little movement is seen, the environment constantly changes, the lighting changes.”

He said the system is sensitive enough to operate even in a dark room with just the light coming off an iPad screen.

Ranking tech entrepreneurialism is a tricky task and whatever measure you come up with is going to annoy somebody, but by at least one measure, Europe’s most entrepreneurial country is Ireland.

What does “most entrepreneurial country” mean? In this analysis, we looked at Dow Jones VentureSource data on the total amount of venture capital raised by tech companies in each European country since 2003, divided by population to get the per capita figure, then averaged it out over the 39 quarters.

More of a yardstick than a micrometer, it does nevertheless reveal a distinct pattern on the continent: high-entrepreneurial activity in the northwest (especially in the Nordic region), falling away as you go farther east and south.

To-do lists are the kind of thing that learner-programmers are asked to build. It is a good task, not too hard but not a trivial problem, and you have something quite useful at the end of it all.

But they are static, they don’t learn from what you do and while they can look good, they don’t offer a huge amount of added value over and above the back of an envelope or a sticky note.

24me, a Tel Aviv-based company, is part of a trend in new technologies that go some of the way toward acting like a digital personal assistant: not merely logging your tasks, but helping you complete them and even anticipating your needs. Expect to see more of these kind of location-aware, time-aware, artificial-intelligence-driven apps.

An Israeli technology company is working on a technology that could transform the semiconductor and energy-storage business. If you transform those industries, you transform modern life.

Store Dot, based in Ramat Gan, just to the west of Tel Aviv, is creating biological semiconductors that can, among other things, store a charge, emit visible light and be used to produce high-capacity, or quick-charging, batteries.

“If everything works, and we have a lot of evidence that it will do, we have a revolution in many devices—memory, batteries, the display, image sensors,” said Doron Myersdorf, chief executive of Store Dot.

BERLIN—When Eugene Jorov was 17, his father, who was just 40, had a fatal heart attack. That was the moment when Mr. Jorov knew what he wanted to do. A keen engineer, he wanted to use technology to stop people dying early like his father.

The Tel Aviv-based startup Angel is his answer.

“This is the culmination of everything,” he said. “To me it is personal.”

“We started out trying to build a product for heart-attack prediction, but we fast realized there was a problem—there was no sensor.” Angel is an open-source hardware wrist sensor that measures four things: heart rate, temperature, blood oxygen and activity.

Entrepreneurs arrive at the recent DLD conference held in the capital of the Israeli tech scene

TEL AVIV—Try as you might, it is extremely hard not to be a bit star-struck by the Israeli technology scene. Just when you think you have seen everything, along comes something even more impressive, such as a startup with a nanotechnology that has the potential to disrupt everything from batteries to display screens to semiconductors.

But can the country continue to deliver in the way it has, and what is next for the startup nation?

It is the scale of Israeli ambition that other startup ecosystems outside the U.S. seem incapable of matching. “It is Silicon Valley for the rest of the world,” said Saul Klein, a London-based venture capitalist and recently appointed a U.K. tech envoy to Israel.

TEL AVIV–Facebook Inc.’s acquisition this week of Israeli start-up Onavo, establishing its first R&D presence here, was hailed as a strategic beachead that would give a new boost to the local technology industry.

During the DLD Tel Aviv conference here, Facebook’s chief for Europe, Middle East and Africa wasted no time in returning the love. Beginning her keynote address with a picture of her family near the Western Wall holy site in Jerusalem, Nicola Mendelsohn said that the company planned to “double down’’ on its newly announced investment in Israel in the years to come and touted Facebook’s close ties with Israeli entrepreneurs.

The addition of Onavo, she said, will help Facebook develop more efficient mobile products and spread its reach throughout the developing world. Ms. Mendelsohn also said Israel’s success in cultivating tech enterprises should be a model to be replicated elsewhere. She praised the Israeli military for an organizational culture that produces entrepreneurs who can adapt in times of adversity.

TEL AVIV—Here’s a thing we haven’t done for a while: a 30-second-pitch contest. In the past we have videoed entrepreneurs pitching their startups and then ran all the videos together. This time, however, it makes more sense to see the videos separately.

Here in Tel Aviv, the DLD conference is under way, a conference that brings together a mix of startups, politicians and commentators.

We interviewed a selection of startups from Israel that are doing things that are innovative, challenging or something out of the ordinary. There aren’t a lot of e-commerce plays here in the Startup Nation.

Finding out what apps are doing on your mobile device and what access they have to your information should become a little bit easier if a service set up by an Israeli startup takes off.

The CEO of Tel Aviv-based MyPermissions said users of mobile devices were put off from installing apps for fear of what is going on behind the scenes. “With 99% of developers there is no malice,” said Olivier Amar. “But they are suffering because of the 1%”.

The company has launched the MyPermissions Trust Certification program designed to certify apps and report to users exactly what that app will do on your phone. So why, for example, would a screen-saver app need access to your address book? Why would a game need to see your SMS messages?

Users of Google Inc.’s Android operating system already get notifications of what services an app is going to use, but not why.

About Tech Europe

Tech Europe covers Europe’s technology leaders, their companies, and the people and industries that support them — and their ideas. The blog is edited by Ben Rooney, with contributions from The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.